echo -n end_marker being printed to stdout

[ice-wzl]

• I've seen the end marker being printed to stdout during my testing.
• I found end_marker in the input_api.py file.
• After forking and starting work I thought it was potentially something I introduced but cloned a fresh untouched copy and the issue persists.
• Opening an issue because I am not sure exactly how to fix this or what is causing it to print to stdout.
• Using terminator and zsh and terminator and bash on another host. Tested on both, see below.

Steps to reproduce

• Occurs both sshed to a machine w/o a pty and in a pty on a local kali system with zsh
• In pty on local system (kali)

  
  python3 ffm.py
  !os
  cat /etc/*release*
  PRETTY_NAME="Kali GNU/Linux Rolling"
  NAME="Kali GNU/Linux"
  VERSION="2023.1"
  VERSION_ID="2023.1"
  VERSION_CODENAME="kali-rolling"
  ID=kali
  ID_LIKE=debian
  HOME_URL="https://www.kali.org/"
  SUPPORT_URL="https://forums.kali.org/"
  BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.kali.org/"
  ANSI_COLOR="1;31"

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[/opt/justice-ffm/FFM] echo -n IJVzPmNFQumMGiuPRRpyZMPFRUVkHHeo

- I did not enter the `echo -n` command
### SSH'ed with no `pty` 

!os cat /etc/release echo -n WNGwrqHpyzOhRwRghOvenIHUzGXWNsVk DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS" PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS" NAME="Ubuntu" VERSION_ID="22.04" VERSION="22.04.2 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)" VERSION_CODENAME=jammy ID=ubuntu ID_LIKE=debian HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/" SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/" PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy" UBUNTU_CODENAME=jammy

- Happy to assist you trying to fix this issue.  Cheers.

[JusticeRage]

Hi! It's been a long time since I've worked on this project, but I vaguely remember this being an issue on occasion. Basically, something challenging is detecting when a command has finished printing output. When using a PTY, there is usually a prompt (i.e., root@kali #>) which can be used as a delimiter. FFM tries to detect such a string with a regular expression that mostly worked back then, but not so much now that prompts have those weird characters ("┌──") in them.

When FFM cannot detect the presence of a prompt, it falls back to an alternate solution, which is printing a random string before and after the command. This string then acts as a delimiter which is used to figure out when the command's output ends.

This is where my memory is a bit fuzzy. I do recall that using the echo -n fallback where it is not needed causes it to become visible. In your examples, I also see that the commands generated by the framework (like cat /etc/*release*) are also printed back in the terminal, which shouldn't be the case. This could be either linked to your specific terminal's settings, or it could be another bug in FFM...

I hope this helps!

[ice-wzl]

Thanks a lot for your explanation. I was able to deduce some of the potential issue but certainly not that fuller picture. Do you plan on ever returning to this project in the near-ish future? If so I would be happy to assist and begin looking into this open issue / other future development. Cheers.

[JusticeRage]

Not in the near future at least, maybe not ever. Since I now work on defense full-time, I don't have any occasion to play with the framework and use it in real-life. If that were to change, then I would surely start adding features again, but this is just not planned at the moment. I'll still happily merge any contributions from the community and fix critical bugs though!